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Nehalem Xeon’s touchdown: could sweep current market

Nehalem-EP debuted this week, bringing with it a sea change in how we view …

Multisocket enthusiasts and/or anyone itching to upgrade to a new workstation have been waiting for Intel's major new Xeon refresh with bated breath. Santa Clara may have made us wait for dual-socket Nehalem goodness, but benchmarks suggest performance will be worth the delay. Rather than launching a handful of high-end models, as it did with Core i7, Intel is debuting a total of 12 new Xeon processors that span a range of capabilities and core counts.

At the top-of-the-line, there's the Xeon W5580 (3.2GHz, quad-core, 8MB L3 cache, 6.4 GT/s QPI, 1333MHz memory speed, and a 130W TDP. If that seems a tad beefy, chances are that Intel's got something else in the new lineup you might be interested in, including low-power Xeons (L5520 and L5506). All of the new processors are quad-core save for the bottom-line entry model E5502 (1.86GHz dual-core, 4MB L3 cache, $188), but hyper-threading support remains something of a premium feature. Of the twelve Xeons launched today, the top eight use HT while the last four do not.

The harsh realities of competition

Just last week we examined current Shanghai performance vs. Harpertown, and we noted that Sunnyvale's 45nm processor was actually in a strong position vs. Harpertown and was holding its own (or beating Intel back) on a number of application fronts. Intel didn't seem too concerned, either, over our findings or what they might mean for Harpertown in 2009, and now we see the reason why. Nehalem-EP is an equal-opportunity behemoth—Anand's results show it laying waste to both Harpertown and Shanghai across their entire battery of tests. Normally you've got to pay a subscription to HBO if you want to see this kind of pounding.

The strong performance of the Xeon EP is no surprise, and it hasn't caught AMD by surprise. Our own benchmarks and Anand's data suggest that AMD won't—physically can't—reclaim the total performance crown from Intel in the server market. Fortunately for AMD, it doesn't need to. Shanghai has proven it can scale, and while we won't see any 4.5GHz wunderprocessors, a solid launch schedule that first hits and then inches past the 3GHz mark should keep the smaller company competitive, particularly if other chipset improvements become available in a timely manner.

For now, Nehalem-EP has swept performance and price efficiency. There's room in the midrange for AMD to carve itself a position, but it's going to keep consistently excellent execution through the next 9-12 months, followed by a flawless transition to 32nm (or wherever the company is headed next.)